The Real Adventure eBook

“Take this chair, Uncle Rod,” said the
boy in a voice of brusk indifference. “Excuse
me, mother?” He barely waited for her nod and
blundered out of the room.

The girl came round to Rodney’s chair to offer
him her hand and drop her curtsy; took a carnation
from a bowl on the table and tucked it into his button-hole,
slid her arm around his neck and kissed his cheek.

Both the children, Frederica was aware, had remarked
something troubled and serious about their uncle’s
manner and each had acted on this observation in his
own way. The boy, distressed and only afraid of
showing it, had bolted from the room with a panicky
assumption of indifference. The girl, though
two years younger, was quite at ease in expressing
her sympathy, and conscious of how decoratively she
did it. (This was Frederica’s analysis,
anyhow. As is the wont of mothers, she liked
the boy better.)

“I think Miss Norris is waiting for you, my
dear.”

“Oui, maman,” said Ellen dutifully.

She was supposed to talk French all the morning, but
somehow this particular observance of the regime irritated
her mother a little and she rather visibly waited
while Ellen quite adequately made her farewells to
her uncle and gracefully left the room.

The tenseness of her attitude relaxed suddenly when
the child was gone. She reached out a cool soft
hand and laid it on one of Rodney’s that rested
limply on the table. There was rather a long silence—­ten
seconds perhaps. Then:

“How did you find out about it?” Rodney
asked.

They were both too well accustomed to these telepathic
short-cuts to take any note of this one. She’d
seen that he knew, just with her first glance at him
there in the doorway; and something a little tenderer
and gentler than most of her caresses about this one,
told him that she did. What it was they knew,
went of course without saying.

“Harriet’s back,” she said.
“She got in day before yesterday. Constance
said something to her about it, thinking she knew.
They’ve thought all along that you and I knew,
too. Harriet was quick enough and clever enough
to pretend she did and yet find out about it, all at
the same time. So that’s so much to the
good. That’s better than having them find
out we didn’t know. Of course Harriet came
straight to me. I’m glad it was Harriet
Constance spoke to about it and not me. I’d
probably have given it away. But Harriet never
batted an eye.”

“No,” said Rodney, “Harriet wouldn’t.”

It was a certain dryness in his intonation rather
than the words themselves Frederica answered.

“She’d do anything in the world for you,
Roddy,” she said, with a vaguely troubled intensity.

This time his mind didn’t follow hers.
For an instant he misunderstood her pronoun, then
he saw what she meant.

“Harriet?—­Oh, yes, Harriet’s
all right,” he said absently.

She left his preoccupation alone for a minute or two,
but at last broke in on it with a question. “How
did you find out about it, Roddy? Who told you?”